The Year's Best SF 11 # 1993

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  When they are gone, she continues to sit in the dark room. Her eyes are open but she does not see. After a while she smiles, takes out a thirty-minute tube, raises it almost reverently to her nose, and breaks the tab.

  A CHILD’S CHRISTMAS IN FLORIDA

  William Browning Spencer

  Here’s a strange and blackly funny little story that depicts a very odd way to celebrate a very familiar holiday, a holiday you may never be able to look at in quite the same way again.…

  New writer William Browning Spencer was born in Washington, D.C., and now lives in Austin, Texas. His first novel, Maybe I’ll Call Anna, was published in 1990 and won a New American Writing Award. His most recent books are a collection, The Return of Count Electric and Other Stories, and a new novel, Resume with Monsters, and he is currently at work on a fantasy novel entitled Zod Wallop.

  * * *

  The week before Christmas, Luke Haliday killed the traditional mud turtle, gutted it, and gave its shell to his oldest son, Hark. Hark painted the shell with day-glo colors and wore it on his head, where it would remain until two days before Christmas when the youngest of the children, Lou Belle, would snatch it from his head, run giggling down to the creek, and fill the gaudy shell with round, smooth stones.

  * * *

  “I miss Harrisburg,” Janice Mosely said to her husband. “It should be cold at Christmas. There should be snow.” Her husband didn’t say anything, but simply leaned over his newspaper like he might dive into it. Well, Al could ignore her if he pleased. She knew he missed Pennsylvania too and just didn’t care to talk about it. There was no getting around it: Christmas was for colder climes, everyone all bundled up and hustling from house to house with presents, red-faced children, loud, wet people in the hall peeling off layers of clothing, scarves, boots, gloves, shouting because they were full of hot life that winter had failed to freeze and ready for any marvelous thing. And snow, snow could make the world look like the cellophane had just been shucked from it, was still crackling in the air.

  “Barbara says it snowed eight inches last week,” Janice said. Barbara was their daughter. Al Mosely looked up from his newspaper and regarded his wife with pale, sleepy blue eyes. A wispy cloud of gray hair bloomed over his high forehead, giving his face a truculent, just-wakened cast. In fact, he had been up since five (his unvarying routine) and regarded his wife’s nine o’clock appearance at the breakfast table as something approaching decadence.

  “She’ll have to get that dodger”—Al always referred to Barbara’s live-in boyfriend as “that dodger,” an allusion to the young man’s ability to avoid matrimony—“She’ll have to get that dodger to shovel her walk this year,” Al said. “She was the one who was so hot for us to retire to Florida, and we done it and we’ll just see if she gets that layabout to do anything more than wait for the spring thaw.”

  “Oh Al,” Janice said, waving a hand at him and turning away. She walked into the living room and stared out the window. Not only had they moved to Florida, they had moved to rural Florida, land of cows and scrub pines and cattle egrets. Her husband had said, “Okay, I’ll go to Florida, but not to some condominium on the ocean. I don’t want a place full of old folks playing bridge and shuffleboard. If I’m gonna retire, I’m gonna retire right. A little place in the country—that’s the ticket.”

  Janice watched a yellow dog walk out into the road. Its image shimmered in the heat, like a bad television transmission. Christmas. Christmas in Loomis, Florida. Dear God. Why, none of her neighbors had even put up lights. And maybe they had the right idea. Why bother? There was no way this flat, sandy place could cobble up a Christmas to fool a half-wit.

  As Janice Mosely stared out the window, three boys, the tallest of them wearing a funny, brightly colored beanie, marched by. A tiny little girl ran in their wake. The boys were carrying a Christmas tree. With an air of triumphant high spirits, they wrestled it down the road, shouting to each other, country boys in tattered jeans and T-shirts and home-cropped haircuts, boys full of reckless enthusiasm and native rudeness. Janice smiled and scolded herself. “Well, it’s a perfectly fine Christmas for some, Mrs. Janice ‘Scrooge’ Mosely,” she said out loud. Still smiling, she turned away from the window and walked back into the kitchen. Her husband was listening to the radio, the news, all of it bleak: war, famine, murder, political graft.

  “What’s the world coming to?” Janice asked her husband.

  “Let me think about it before I answer,” Al said.

  * * *

  Hark was the oldest boy, but he wasn’t right in the head, so Danny, who was three years younger, was in charge. “You don’t do it that way,” Danny said. “You will just bust your fingers doing it that way. Boy, you are a rattlebrain.”

  “Shut up,” Hark said. “If you know what’s good for you, shut up.”

  “What’s the problem here?” their father asked, coming into the backyard. Luke Haliday was a tall, lanky man with a bristly black mustache. There wasn’t any nonsense in him and his children knew it. He had been very strict since their mother left. Now he said, “Maybe you would rather fight than have a Christmas?”

  “No, no!” shouted little Lou Belle who was so infused with the spirit of Christmas that it made her eyes bulge. The boys, Hark, Danny, and Calder, all shouted: “No, no.”

  “I was just trying to explain to Hark that you got to tie these traps onto the tree first and then set em. You do it the other way, you just catch all your fingers,” Danny said.

  Luke laid a hand on Hark’s shoulder. “Is this the first tree you ever decorated?” he asked his son.

  “No sir,” Hark said.

  “Well then,” Luke said.

  “Tie em, then set em,” Hark said, kicking dirt.

  Luke stood back from his children and regarded the Christmas tree; the boys had dug a hole for the trunk and braced it with wires and stakes. The tree stood straight, tall and proud, the field rolling out behind it. “That’s a damned fine tree,” Luke said. “You children got an eye for a tree. You take this one out of Griper’s field?”

  “Yes sir,” Danny said.

  “It’s a good one,” their father said. He reached down, picked up one of the mousetraps, and tied it to a branch with a piece of brown string. Then he set the trap and stood back again. The tree already had a dozen traps tied to various branches. “If a tree like this can’t bring us luck then we might as well give up. We might as well lie down and let them skin us and salt us if a tree like this don’t bode a fine Christmas.”

  The children agreed.

  Their father turned and walked back to the shack, and the children set to work tying the remaining traps to branches. Later they would paint colored dots on them. “I want blue,” Lou Belle insisted. “I want mine blue.” Her voice was shrill, prepared for an argument, but Danny just said, “Sure. Why not?”

  “Hello,” Janice shouted, when she saw the little girl again. “Hello, little girl.” The child turned and stared at Janice for a long time before finally changing course and toddling toward the old woman.

  “Lou Belle,” the little girl said in answer to Janice’s question. What a sweet child, Janice thought, with such full cheeks—they cried out to be pinched—and those glorious, big brown eyes. The girl wore corduroy overalls and a white T-shirt. Her feet were bare.

  “What’s Santa bringing you for Christmas?” Janice asked.

  The girl shrugged her shoulders. “Santa don’t come to our house,” she said.

  “Oh, I’m sure he does.” Janice knelt down and placed her hands on the child’s shoulders. Lou Belle was a frail little thing. “Santa wouldn’t miss a sweet little girl like you.”

  “Yes’m,” the girl said. “He don’t come anymore. He left. He and my mommy. They went to live in sin.”

  “Goodness,” Janice said. What an odd child.

  Janice stood up. “Would you like to see my Christmas tree? I just finished decorating it, and I thought, ‘There’s no one around to see it except Al’—t
hat’s my husband, and he couldn’t care less about such things. And then I looked out the window and there you were, and I thought, ‘I bet that little girl would like to see this tree.’”

  “Yes’m,” Lou Belle said, and she followed Janice Mosely into the house, and she studied the evergreen that Janice had harried her husband into buying and which she had then decorated carefully, all the while listening to Christmas music and ignoring her husband’s grumblings and general humbuggery.

  Lou Belle touched the glass ornaments. Lou Belle leaned close and blinked at the hand-sewn angels. She even rubbed the styrofoam snowman against her cheek—it made a skritch, skritch sound—but finally she stepped back and said, “It won’t catch nuthin.”

  * * *

  Lou Belle thought about it that night when she couldn’t sleep. Silly old lady. What could you catch inside a house, anyway? Even with the best of traps?

  Lou Belle couldn’t sleep because tomorrow was Omen Day, the third day before Christmas. Last night they had baited the traps, and this morning they would get out of bed while it was still dark out; they would wake their father and he would make them eat breakfast first, while they craned their necks and peered out the back window, trying to squint through the darkness. Father would move slow, especially slow out of that meanness that adults have, and he would fix eggs and toast and talk about everything, as though it weren’t Omen Day at all but any normal day and finally, finally, when they had all finished and were watching and fidgeting as their father mopped up the last of his eggs with a bread crust, he would say, “All right, let’s see what we’ve got.”

  And it would still be dark, and he would grab up the big lantern flashlight and they would run down to the tree.

  Who could possibly sleep the night before Omen Day?

  And when it finally did come, when Lou Belle could stand it no longer and ran into her brother Hark’s room and woke him and then the two of them fetched Danny and Calder and the long, long breakfast was endured, they pushed the screen door open and ran out into the darkness of the yard. Her heart thrummed like a telephone wire in a hurricane. The grass was wet under her feet.

  She thought she would faint when her father, moving the flashlight over the tree, said, “There’s a lizard. That’s a red dot. Calder, that’s you.” She wanted to cry out, “No! Not Calder! I’m the Chosen!” But before she could scream, her father spoke again, in a low, awed whisper. “Well, would you look at that.” And Lou Belle followed the flashlight’s beam with her eyes, and there, flapping awkwardly, caught, like a wound-down toy, was a black, furry lump, and her breathing flipped backwards and she said, in a hiccup of triumph, “Bat!” And she knew, before her father called out “Blue, that’s Lou Belle” that it was hers.

  And she didn’t need her father to tell her that bat was best, that bat was the king of good luck. She clapped her hands and laughed.

  “Light the tree, Lou Belle,” they urged her, and she smelled the kerosene smell that was, more than anything, the smell of Christmas, and her father gave her the burning straw and she thrust it forward, and the whole tree stood up with flame, whoosh, and in the brightness she could see the bat, her bat, and she squealed with joy. Then her father started it off, with his fine, deep voice. “Silent night, holy night,” he sang. They all joined in. “All is calm, all is bright.”

  “Listen,” Janice said to her husband. “Do you hear that?”

  “What?”

  “Carolers,” Janice said. “Isn’t that nice?”

  * * *

  Because Lou Belle was the Chosen, she stole the mud turtle shell from Hark and filled it with smooth stones. And on Christmas Eve, just before twilight, Lou Belle distributed the stones among her brothers, and they each made their wishes on them and solemnly threw them into the lake, and then they all climbed into the back of their father’s pickup truck and drove into town and on past the town and down to Clearwater and late, very late at night, with the salt air filling her lungs, Lou Belle fell asleep, her head resting on a dirty blanket smelling faintly of gasoline. When she woke it was dark, thick, muggy dark, and Hark was urging her out of the truck. She ran after them, instantly alert. A bouncing, silver ball on the grass was the orb of her father’s flashlight.

  They were in a suburb. She heard glass break and then Danny was beside her. “Come on, come on,” he was whispering.

  Oh. Her father had pushed open the sliding glass door to reveal, like a magician, a treasure of gifts, gaudily wrapped boxes, all strewn under a thick-bodied Christmas tree pin-pricked with yellow lights. Amid all the gift-wrapped boxes, a marvelous orange tricycle with yellow handlebars glowed.

  “Oh,” Lou Belle said. She pointed a stubby finger at the bike, and her father moved swiftly across the room, lifted the bike and returned to her.

  “Shhhhhhhhhhh,” her father said, raising a finger to his lips.

  Hark and Danny and Calder were busy under the tree. Calder raised both hands, clutching a brand new air rifle, a smile scrawled across his face.

  This is the best Christmas, the best, Lou Belle thought. Next year some of the magic would be gone. Other Christmases would bring disillusionment. She would learn, as her brothers already knew, that her father took great pains to discover a proper house, and that it was his vigilance and care in the choosing that was important, not the catch on Omen Day, not how fervently the wishes were placed on the turtle stones.

  But for now it was all magic, and as they raced back across the lawn and piled into the truck, as the motor caught with a sound like thunder, as someone behind them shouted, Lou Belle sent a quick prayer to the baby Jesus, king of thieves.

  WHISPERS

  Maureen F. McHugh and David B. Kisor

  Born in Ohio, Maureen F. McHugh spent some years living in Shijiazhuang in the People’s Republic of China, an experience that has been one of the major shaping forces on her fiction to date. Upon returning to the United States, she made her first sale in 1989, and has since made a powerful impression on the SF world of the early nineties with a relatively small body of work, becoming a frequent contributor to Asimov’s Science Fiction, as well as selling to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Alternate Warriors, Aladdin, and other markets. In 1992, she published one of the year’s most widely acclaimed and talked-about first novels, China Mountain Zhang, which received the prestigious Tiptree Memorial Award. Coming up is a new novel, tentatively entitled Half the Day Is Night. Recently married, she lives in Twinsburg, Ohio.

  David B. Kisor is a composer and musician who used to work at the same company as McHugh, where this story grew out of a discussion between them about how hard it is to be creative and hold a day job at the same time. It was his first professional sale, and their first collaboration.

  In it, they give us a harrowing look at a future world ravaged by a strange and devastating plague—a world in which the boundary lines between the Haves and the Have-Nots, between the fortunate and the unfortunate, and between family and strangers, are suddenly being redrawn in some startling and very unexpected ways.…

  * * *

  The plague is not the only health problem in the countryside surrounding Tai’an. Shandong is a rural province, the Appalachia of China. Shandong peasants are the hillbillies of China, and have something of the same reputation—apparently not very bright, distrustful of strangers, local boys who let you think you’re real smart until they get you out on their own terms. I don’t know if they’re moonshiners; the clear local sorghum liquor (which we foreigners call “jet fuel” because it smells like fingernail polish and is usually about 150 proof) is probably too cheap to encourage much bootlegging.

  Not that it’s Lexington or Louisville. A Kentucky girl like me doesn’t feel at home; after all, Kentucky isn’t particularly famous for its brine-pickled vegetables (not just cucumber; but carrots, and cabbage with hot peppers, too). The land is bare and brown, the hills covered in places with dead grass and a few pine trees, but in other places scratched to bare, baked or frozen earth.<
br />
  I work in a clinic about an hour south of Tai’an, headed toward Qufu, the ancient birthplace of Confucius. The town is called Lijiazhang, and the clinic is brick and concrete. It used to be a store. I vaccinate for plague, and treat a lot of poverty-related diseases, too. Tuberculosis is rampant because they burn bituminous coal (this part of Shandong is coal country, mountainous like West Virginia). Bituminous coal is soft, high-sulfur coal. Black-lung stuff when they mine it. Here, after they get it out of the ground, they grind it to powder in places with so little regard for workers’ health that OSHA representatives would probably have seizures, then they mix it with mud to make dull-black round bricks with holes through them. They burn the bricks in stoves to heat and cook. The bricks burn more slowly than pure coal.

  We burn the bricks in the clinic, too. Our stove is a red-brick affair, kind of like an oven. It’s got a vent, but the pipe doesn’t draw correctly, and it’s thick with whatever the stuff is that clogs coal stoves. I thought I read that the stuff is dangerous and can cause explosions, but nobody seems particularly concerned. Much of the smoke from the stove hangs in the clinic. Like everybody else, I’ve had a chest cold since November, and when I spit into the toilet after working all day, my saliva is laced with black from the smoke. We test ourselves for tuberculosis every sixty days. So far, nobody has tested positive. I wonder what two years in China is going to do for my health. Besides lung damage from the pollution, they still use DDT and pesticides that have been banned in the US for fifty years. It would be ironic to have survived the plague in my childhood only to die a few years from now of cancer that originated in exposure from something in Tai’an.

  Particularly since, after an initial burst of enthusiasm, the locals have made it clear that they don’t think much of the efficacy of Western medicine in treating EID. The new vaccine is only about 50 percent effective. Furthermore, if the host has already been infected and the virus is latent, vaccination can activate it. It’s hard to explain to people that the vaccine doesn’t cause the disease. It’s not what they want—they want Western medicine to provide instant answers, or they’ll go back to their own methods.